Our Strange Language

When the English tongue we speak,
Why is “break” not rhymed with “freak”?
Will you tell me why it’s true,
We say “sew” but likewise “few”,

And the fashioner of verse
Cannot cap his “horse” with “worse”?
“Beard” sounds not the same as “heard”,
“Cord” is different from “word”;

“Cow” is cow but “low” is low,
“Shoe” is never rhymed with “foe”;
Think of “hose” and “dose” and “lose”,
And of “goose” and also “choose”;

Think of “tomb” and “bomb” and “comb”,
“Doll” and “roll” and “some” and “home”,
And since “pay” is rhymed with “say”,
Why not “paid” and “said” I pray?

We have “blood” and “food” and “good”,
“Mould” is not pronounced like “could”;
Wherefore “done” but “gone” and “lone”?
Is there any reason known?

No in short, it seems to me
Sound and letters disagree.

–E.L. Sabin

QOTD

“Our generation must be the one that says, “We must halt global warming.” If we don’t act now, it will be too late. Our generation must be the one that says “yes” to renewable fuels and ends forever our dependence on foreign oil. Our generation must be the one that accepts responsibility for conserving natural resources and demands the tools to do it. And our generation must be the one that builds the New Energy Economy. How do we do it? It won’t be easy, but it is time to ask the American people to be patriotic about something other than war.“

– John Edwards

(emphasis mine; full interview here)

QOTD

Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

Yeah, makes perfect sense…

– Author Unknown

QOTD

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

(Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.)

QOTD

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

–Groucho Marx

QOTD

“I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants”

– A. Whitney Brown

QOTD

“It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure.

Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.”

–Nathaniel S Borenstein

QOTD

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something”
-Thomas Huxley

QOTD

“Three can keep a secret if two are dead.”

-Benjamin Franklin

QOTD

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

–Douglas Adams

Freedom that isn’t free

God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When god says the same we call him “loving” and build churches in his honor.

–William C. Easttom II

QOTD

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Arthur C. Clarke

Intellectual Honesty

A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically?

–Francis Crick

One way to look at it

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.

–Niels Bohr

Simplify

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

–Albert Einstein

QOTD

“A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically?”

–Francis Crick

He must be a creationist

A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box. manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”

–Douglas Adams

Makes me hungry

It’s always been a case of the God of the Gaps and now the gaps are closing. It must be suffocating to be religious. You used to be able to see God in storms, trees, the flight of swallows, a rainbow, the entrails of a lamb. Now they are reduced to seeing the image of Jesus in a chicken burrito.

–Slashdot Comment